You build contraptions to engage in medieval warfare. Those contraptions can be catapults, tanks, helicopters, medieval Mechs or whatever death machine you can conjure up.
I’m usually quite wary of buying anything in Alpha. I bought Besiege and was quite pleased. You should too, especially since it’ll get more expensive as content is added. It’s quite cheap right now, a few cups of coffee’s worth but a lot more fun.
A review that seizes the essence of the game:
Tried to make a Trebuchet that fired a bomb.
Made a bomb which fired a Trebuchet
11/10
Check out what you can do: http://imgur.com/t/besiege
Looks really cool but I am afraid to start it in early access. I mean, it is fun building things but that is all there is to it near as I can see and I don’t want to ruin it for later whenever it is done.
“That looks pretty cool. Aww, it’s giving them a hug! Is that a swastika? Why is it lighting everything on fire? What does a swastika have to do with…oh. Oh!”
Based on the strength of recommendations here and on Steam, I bought; I’ll play with it tonight. I hope it is very wide-open, rather than just have a false choice of only 2-3 workable solutions.
Free building mode need to be at its default value of off to unlock the next level. However, if you want to come back to a level you’ve already beaten and be unconstrained, remember that you can turn free building mode on.
You can also rebind the keys for individual parts which is very useful.
Please report back.
Ohhhh…is that what that “key bind” menu option is (and I am not saying this sarcastically); I hit that menu option a couple of times, but nothing seemed to happen, so I wasn’t sure what it did. I’ll have to fiddle with it more tonight, because it gets tedious going back through all the icons to select parts.
I must say, there is very, very little hand-holding or tutorialising in the game, which is both part of its charm and its challenge. For example, you have to figure out on your own how to make a steerable vehicle. Fortunately, it isn’t difficult, although making a vehicle with precise steering eludes me a bit.
I only played about an hour, and got through about 5 levels (the last one being where you face several squads of meatbags); I was too brain-dead from work to concentrate enough to get further. But I loved how my “failure” on that last level turned into success: my flimsy vehicle with a flamethrower approached the squad dead-ahead, and I turned on the flame thrower, and it only burnt a few, while at the same time the flanking meatbags were melee-attacking the vehicle, which caused it to collapse, which caused the whole vehicle to become aflame, which then spread to all the attacking meatbags. WIN!
In the building phase, click on key bind, then click on the part you want to assign keys to (it’ll become red when your mouse is over it).
For wheels, I build a base which is about as wide as it’s long. Then, since I’m a lefty, I use the numeric keypad on the right of my keyboard and assign 7 to “forward” and 1 to “backward” on the left wheels. I assign 9 to “forward” and 3 to “backward” on the right wheels. This gives me very precise controls.
Pressing 7 + 9 goes forward at full speed. 1 + 3 goes backward. 7 will gently go right and forward. 9 will do the same on the left and forward.
If I press 1 + 9, the vehicle will turn counterclockwise in place like a tank. 7 + 3 turns clockwise.
And yes, you often get catastrophic failures that turn into catastrophic wins.
Do you use the steering thing to block the wheels? If so, tearing apart my contraption when I tried to turn was also a problem I had.
When I assigned 7 and 1 to the left wheels and 9 and 3 to the right wheels on my numpad, I stopped having that problem.
Think of your wheel as tank treads.
If you’re a righty and want to use your left hand to control basic vehicle movement, you can use the key mapper like such:
left wheels: forward = q back = a
right wheels: forward = e back = d
q+e= forward
a+d= back
q+d= clockwise turn
a+e=counter-clockwise turn
I came across a steering technique that in many instances seems to work better than 7-1,9-3. Stack three wheels together where ever you’re putting wheels, the outer two keep the default up/down arrow key mapping but the inner wheel maps [left arrow key/right arrow key] if it’s on the right side of the vehicle and reverse that order for the left side. On many designs it’s smoother and for me, far more intuitive. Only real downside is it complicates the use of suspensions unless you’re building a very large vehicle.
And I came across a short YouTube vid of a really impressive battle buggy, I’ll need to build me one of those.
Thank you MichaelEmouse for introducing this game, makes being snowed in a bit more fun.
Played this game over the weekend – fun little game. I look forward to more levels – the building was fun, but once I found ways to kill and destroy everything I just wanted more things to kill and destroy, rather than find new ways to kill and destroy them.
Picked this up yesterday. Great fun. Built a basic catapult, got decent distance with it (direct hit on the windmill from the default starting position in free build mode, at least when it doesn’t blow itself up).
Looking on YouTube people have built some pretty impressive machines. Here’s some good ones. I think #5, Hidden Catapult is my favorite of those.
